A dagger in the night (page 13)
Emil Hering and Janosch A. Prufrock turned from the sea-bridge back to the kurpark, and walked along its meandering well-kept path.
“The kurpark was designed by the landscape architekt and prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, oder?”
It was posed as a question, but Janosch A. Prufrock’s tone did not expect to be wrong. Emil Hering simply nodded, but did not rise to the line of conversation. Janosch A. Prufrock tried again.
“Each year, on the Kaiser Days, many… interesting people come here to Vineta, oder?”
The rhetorical nature of the question was so patently obvious that Emil Hering again did not take it up. It was not that he was unfriendly, though he was reserved. He wanted Janosch A. Prufrock to come to the point he was trying to get at as quickly as possible, because Emil had a sinking feeling about its direction.
“But this year… perhaps an unusual number of adventurers—”
Janosch A. Prufrock’s sentence was cut short. A flying dagger whistled past them, and landed with a soft, clean “thuck” in someone in the shrubbery beyond, and a human voice gurgled, and was gone.
The two men rushed to where the sound had come from, and while they could see disturbed grass and nettles, no one was there. They turned back toward the darkness, but could only see a shadow disappearing.
Janosch A. Prufrock shook his walking stick, and out of its handle, which he now twisted, he pulled out a rapier. The sharpness of its edge almost disappeared in the moonlight, and asked Emil, “Can you fight?”
Emil shook his head and felt self-conscious. He wished he could say yes, but he had never learned to fence. He had dreamed of going to Greifswald, to the universität, and fighting in a mensur. But the money was never there for anything like that, and he took over the pension Villa Undine, when his father did not come back from the Baltic Sea because—